LaserAmharic in Unicode provides 6 high-quality, Unicode-encoded Amharic (or Ethiopic) TrueType« fonts in two typestyles (EthiopicLSU and AmharicLSU) for typing at least 26 languages in the Hamito-Semitic family of languages which use the Ge'ez script. (See below for a list of languages). The LaserAmharic in Unicode fonts include separate composite forms of each character in the Amharic Syllabary. The text is therefore balanced in form and beautiful, both on screen and in print. The fonts also include the Latin 1 character set and additional Latin characters and diacritics covering many other Latin languages.
Ethiopic languages are commonly typed with either a wide blank wordspace or a wide space with dots (). In addition, modern and ancient Ethiopic text may differ in the width of the other punctuation (either narrow or wide). Currently, the Unicode standard only includes the narrow English space and the wide Ethiopic space with dots (and not the wide blank wordspace). Furthermore, Windows and the Macintosh Operating Systems will only justify text using the space that is in the regular English space position in the font. This means that Ethiopic text normally cannot be justified in your files. The LaserAmharic in Unicode fonts support the various requirements of Ethiopic text by having three versions of both typestyles of the fonts. The user can choose combinations of the wide blank wordspace, the wordspace with dots, and narrow or wide Ethiopic punctuation. One of the pairs of fonts even allows full justification of Ethiopic text, normally not supported by either Windows or the Macintosh.
LaserAmharic in Unicode includes two deadkey keyboard layouts that provide four characters per key (instead of the normal two) for easy, intuitive input of 1) the Ethiopic languages; and 2) English and other western Latin languages. The Ethiopic keyboard calls up the appropriate syllable as you type it.

Specifications:
Operating Systems
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Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) or higher
bullet Applications
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Any Unicode-compatible application.
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The only Macintosh applications we are aware of that support Unicode at this time are Microsoft Word 2008 and 2004, Nisus Writer Express, InDesign CS, TextEdit (included with Mac OS X), Mellel, Oxygen, BBEdit, and OpenOffice. We have only tested the fonts in Word 2004, Nisus Writer Express and TextEdit. (If you are aware of additional applications please let us know.)
bullet Notes
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These fonts are compatible with the Windows version of LaserAmharic in Unicode. No conversion of files is necessary when transferring files to Windows if your applications are fully Unicode-aware and compatible fonts are installed on both systems.

Languages supported by LaserAmharic in Unicode:
bullet Afar
bullet Ethiopic Tigrina
bullet Kebena
bullet Somali
bullet Agaw
bullet Ge'ez
bullet Kembata
bullet Tigre
bullet Amharic
bullet Gedeo
bullet Konso
bullet Wolaita
bullet Ari
bullet Gumuz
bullet Kunama
bullet Tatar
bullet Blin
bullet Hadiyya
bullet Me'en
plus additional
bullet Dizi
bullet Harari
bullet Oromo
languages that use
bullet Eritrean Tigrina (Tigri˝a, Tigrinya)
bullet Kaffa
bullet Saho
the Ge'ez alphabet.
Latin Languages covered by LaserAmharic in Unicode:
bullet Afrikaans
bullet English
bullet Indonesian
bullet Swedish
bullet Basque
bullet Finnish
bullet Italian
bullet Catalan
bullet French
bullet Norwegian
plus additional
bullet Danish
bullet German
bullet Portuguese
languages covered
bullet Dutch
bullet Icelandic
bullet Spanish
by code page 1252
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In order to support both ancient and modern Ethiopic texts plus English, we provide the narrow (English-sized) blank space, the wide (Ethiopic-sized) blank wordspace (which is not yet in the Unicode standard), and the wide space with dots (which is part of the Unicode standard). We also provide the narrow Ethiopic punctuation commonly used today and the wide punctuation commonly used in ancient texts. To do this we have created three versions of each typestyle. All six fonts are included in the product with instructions to help you decide which font to use for your projects. Following are descriptions of the three versions of the fonts.